Bishop Fintan Gavin: Church ‘paying price’ for allowing its power to corrupt

BISHOP Fintan Gavin has written a pastoral letter which will be read at all Masses throughout the diocese of Cork and Ross this weekend, in which he has outlined sweeping new changes to parish structures.

That restructuring has been well flagged over the summer, with most Mass-goers in the diocese likely to be aware that parishes are to be grouped together in “families of parishes”, in which priests and deacons work across all of the parishes.

The families of parishes consist of a minimum of three parishes and a maximum of six, an arrangement which has been deemed necessary in Ireland’s largest diocese geographically.

Cork and Ross will see 12 priests retire in 2022, and only one new priest ordained.

Ahead of the reading of his pastoral letter at Masses, Bishop Gavin gave an interview to The Echo, in which he spoke about the challenges facing the Catholic Church in Ireland, saying that, with an ageing clergy and declining numbers of vocations, the priesthood will have to have less of a central role if the Church is to renew itself, and he said it would be necessary for lay Catholics to play a greater role in the work of spreading the Gospel.

Bessborough 

He said his own work with victims of clerical sex abuse had been “a gamechanger” for him and he pledged to support survivors of the former mother-and-baby institution at Bessborough and their relatives, promising to back “whatever needs to happen so we can get to the truth”.

The bishop said it had been challenging at times to introduce changes in the diocese and he had encountered some resistance, but he had attempted to build trust with clergy and parishioners since he was appointed to Cork and Ross by Pope Francis in 2019.

“It’s taken a good while, and a lot of work because it’s about relationships, it’s about building trust, and all of that takes time,” he said.

“You’re basically asking the priests and the people to trust you with a new vision of a Church for the future.”

Part of that vision is the family of parishes model, with co-operation across a number of parishes together.

“With that model, the gifts and talents of the whole community, priests and people, are shared. Like anything when there’s more people involved, there’s more possibilities, and the priests are shared across the parishes, so while they’re assigned living in a particular parish, to work across the parishes,” the bishop said.

“That allows the whole diocese then to form into 16 of these families of parishes, where we can work together and have greater collaboration and co-operation, but it also opens up all kinds of new possibilities that were being called for in our synodal conversations, like better liturgies, greater participation of the lay faith, more involvement and leadership of lay people, and more ownership of the faith community.”

Bishop Gavin said that a necessary result of there being fewer priests in the diocese would be that some churches would not have a Sunday Mass every week, and parishioners might need to travel further afield.

“We will have to organise a timetable around the resources that are there, which will mean that some churches won’t have a Sunday Mass. 

"Do we have to have as many Masses as we have now? Probably not, but if people are working together, we will have better celebrations.”

He said it was necessary for the Catholic Church to re-order its structures to better do its work in spreading the Gospel, and he believed that this could only be done with lay members taking on a greater role within the Church. He said the essential message of the Church was needed today more than ever, and the values of the Gospel had informed so much that is good in society.

Community leaders 

He referred to two people who are community leaders in Cork, Don O’Leary, director of the Cork Life Centre, and Caitríona Twomey, co-ordinator of Cork Penny Dinners.

“When you think of people like Don, his inspiration is Christian, however overtly, but he’s a prophet in many ways, or Caitríona, in her own way,” he said.

The bishop said the changes which are coming to the Catholic Church in Ireland are a response to changed times, and he felt the Church was now paying a price for its previously dominant role in the country, one which he said had led to the corruption of the Church.

The Church had, however, served the country well, he said, in the education system and health service, but he believes that position of power had come at a price, and at times that price was losing sight of its own mission.

“Power corrupts, and the abuse of children, the abuse of women, the abuse of power, all of those things happened when power corrupted,” he said.

“Power corrupts. Does it have to happen? No, but power tends to do that for all of us.”

On the issue of mother-and-baby institutions, the bishop said it was “too easy to be black and white” in allocating sole blame to the Catholic Church for those institutions, saying the Church had been working with the State.

Bishop Gavin said he had been speaking recently with Carmel Cantwell, whose brother William died at the former mother-and-baby institution at Bessborough in 1960, and he had pledged to help in any way he could, saying he would support her calls for an investigation of the former institution.

Between 1922 and 1998 the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary ran Bessborough as a mother-and- baby institution, and during that time 923 children died there, or after transfer from there, and the bodies and burial records of more than 800 children are missing.